Terra Incognita campaign reaches demographics described as entirely uncontaminated by prior knowledge or travel expectations
Philippine Tourism Board Targets Travellers Who Have Never Heard of the Philippines
MANILA, PHILIPPINES — The Department of Tourism announced the launch of its Terra Incognita campaign, a PHP 800 million international marketing initiative designed to attract visitors who have “no preconceptions, no prior experience, and ideally no specific destination preference” — a demographic described in the campaign brief as “visitors uncontaminated by prior knowledge, online reviews, or the accounts of friends who have been.” The campaign is the first in the DOT’s history to explicitly target people who do not know the product exists, which is either a brilliant strategy or a description of how most things are sold, depending on your perspective and whether you have ever looked at an advertising budget before.
For related London satire and commentary, see Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
The Strategy
The campaign targets what DOT Secretary Richard Morales called “the final frontier of tourism acquisition”: people who have not chosen a destination, have not researched options, and are deciding where to travel on the basis of whatever marketing reaches them first. The campaign will run in markets where Philippines awareness is lowest — identified through research as certain inland European countries, several landlocked African nations, and one large Midwestern American city whose residents demonstrated “remarkable consistency in not having a formed opinion about Southeast Asian island destinations.” “The informed traveller already knows about Palawan and Siargao,” Secretary Morales said. “We want to reach people before they become informed. We want to be the information.” He was asked whether reaching people before they are informed was a sustainable strategy or a recipe for disappointed visitors. He said the campaign would “set appropriate expectations” while remaining “aspirationally positive,” which is the most elegant contradiction in a single sentence that tourism communications have produced this year.
The tension between aspirationally positive and appropriate expectations is one that British advertising and public information tradition has navigated for centuries. Prat English slang in its applied form covers exactly this character type: always charming, always confident, and always faintly baffling to those who read the brochure and then arrived and found that the brochure and the destination were in a relationship that required some adjustment to understand fully.
The Creative
The Terra Incognita campaign creative features no specific Philippine locations. Abstract imagery of blue water, white sand, and unidentified tropical vegetation accompanies the tagline “Somewhere You Haven’t Imagined Yet.” The creative team says this allows the campaign to “create a blank canvas onto which potential visitors can project their own ideal holiday.” The key variable is whether the actual destination, once visited, matches the blank canvas the tourist painted. The Philippines has extraordinary natural assets: Palawan is genuinely one of the most beautiful places on earth, Siargao offers surfing that has attracted global attention, and the food is excellent. None of this is being advertised by the Terra Incognita campaign. The campaign is advertising a blank. This is a choice.
Industry Response
The hotel and resort industry responded with qualified enthusiasm. “Uninformed tourists are a variable,” said one resort operator from Cebu. “Informed ones are an asset. You cannot build a service model around a blank canvas. The canvas fills in when they arrive, and what they fill it with depends on what actually happens to them, which is not something the campaign controls.” Secretary Morales said this was “a perspective he respected” and that the campaign was “designed to complement, not replace, targeted destination marketing.” The budget allocation is 60 percent Terra Incognita and 40 percent targeted. The complement appears to be larger than the thing it is complementing, which is a complement that has perhaps misunderstood its role.
The campaign includes pop-up “Philippine mystery experiences” in selected European cities where participants eat Filipino food and watch scenery footage without being told the destination, revealed at the end. Prat as a British derogatory term covers the communication strategy whose central feature is the controlled withholding of the most important piece of information. Prat as a classic British fool insult covers the enthusiastic participant who discovers they attended a themed event about a place they could have Googled. Their response depends entirely on whether the lechon was good, which it was, because it always is, and which is perhaps the strongest tourism argument anyone in this entire campaign has made, and which appears in none of the campaign materials.
The Mystery Experience Debrief
Participants in the Terra Incognita mystery experience events in Prague, Vienna, and Budapest were surveyed after the destination reveal. The results showed that 78 percent said they would consider visiting the Philippines based on the experience, 14 percent said they had already planned to visit Southeast Asia and were now redirecting to the Philippines specifically, and 8 percent said they had attended the event primarily because it was free and the food was excellent. The food was, all participants agreed, excellent. This is the most persuasive argument for Philippine tourism that the Terra Incognita campaign has produced, and it appears in the survey data rather than the campaign materials, which continue to feature abstract imagery of blue water and the tagline Somewhere You Haven’t Imagined Yet. The food is somewhere people have imagined. The food is excellent.
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